For our customer, a leading, multinational Life Sciences group headquartered in the Basel area, we are seeking a Director Business Planning & Project Coordination BU:

Responsibilities:

• Reporting to the Head BU, act as business planning and project coordination specialist overlooking the BU’s product manufacturing projects
• Proactively influence, support and implement strategic decisions of the BU
• Run a structured, efficient and smooth Program Management Office with a standardized planning approach, providing project management and content support for special projects (schedules, priorities, project plans, goals, budget, resources, risks)
• Develop into a centre of excellence for project management and provide guidance and coaching to novice project managers or new project managers who need to understand how the organization runs projects
• Create a project dashboard, outlining both the projects currently underway and those on the backlog, with their priority according to the overall business objectives
• Deliver a planning approach based on sizing of the market opportunities based on trends and focusing on a customer segmentation approach to derive clearly defined commercial goals that are communicated to sales force
• Annually review the BU actual status vs the proposed plan, understand deviations and key drivers (differentiate market vs internal drivers)
• Link the planning process to the marketing communications strategy and ensure brand consistency
• Partner with colleagues in different roles to assess the workloads and impacts for different departments, thus identifying dependencies and possible issues across teams
• Develop and communicate clear and actionable deliverables, or activities to be completed; each deliverable/activity having an identified owner, the person who will carry this out, as well as a clear timeline and success criteria
• Provide resources for special projects that require analytical, market research or project management resources
• Support individual project teams in establishing the structure necessary to reach to project goals
• Responsible for tracking deadlines, deliverables, resources, and timelines throughout all ongoing projects
• Direct the overall process of carrying out the ongoing projects; adapt plans based on evolving needs, conditions or issues that may arise; ensure on-time, high-quality delivery in accordance with the stated project goals
• Oversee individual and combined projects’ cost and make sure they are well managed; monitor profit and cost sheets for the projects
• Maintain quality system and cGMP compliance for the business by ensuring that all project managers and teams comply with processes, procedures and instructions
• Hold owners accountable for their commitments and conduct project team meetings to provide status updates and identify and resolve issues.
• Co-ordinate and track the status of all projects in the BU based on updates from the project managers
• Upon completion of a project, compile and document project information, for reference for future projects and to assess the project delivery, completeness and alignment with stated objectives and goals
• At any given time, manage multiple projects for the BU, each with varying priority, timelines and resource requirements
• Responsible for balancing projects and communicating priorities internally; use a portfolio process to prioritize projects based on investments and strategic requirements
• Work with leaders on project decision-making; evaluate against the company’s overall objectives, and resource requirements.
• Identify processes and activities to improve; identify workable process standards and best practices; document and communicate such processes, standards and practices to the organization.
• Provide leadership in best practices and project management tools
• Assess the current way that the BU tracks customer compliance and satisfaction, identify improvement areas and develop a consistent, scalable process that addresses these areas and monitors progress

Requirements:

• Master degree or PhD in a technical/natural science combined with a degree in Business Administration on BA or Master level
• At least 10 years project management experience gained within a complex, regulated environment or consulting
• International experience is strongly requested
• Experience at working both independently and in a team-oriented, collaborative environment at senior level
• Experienced in cGMP
• MS Office, MS Project know-how
• Fluency in English; German would be a plus
• Familiar with project management software would be a plus
• Experience in managing matrix-based, cross-functional teams
• Solid internal and external collaboration and influencing skills and the ability to lead diverse, cross-functional teams in the successful delivery of project initiations and successfully transitioning into project execution
• Ability to prepare and support decisions that require in-depth evaluation of extremely complex factors, the management of ambiguity and interactions with multiple stakeholders
• Ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a fast paced environment is crucial
• Ability to read communication styles of team members and contractors who come from a broad spectrum of disciplines
• Ability to elicit cooperation from a wide variety of sources
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Motivating team player, drives results, excellent
• Ability to think at an abstract level
• Ability to think through the pros and cons of structures and make solid arguments
• Ability to conform to shifting priorities, demands and timelines through analytical and problem-solving capabilities
• Persuasive, encouraging and motivating
• Ability to learn, understand and apply new technologies.
• Willingness to travel (approx. 30%)